Website

Today’s question is a good one. A pet sitter has just completed her website and is ready to publish it online. How does she go about informing the search engines?

I’m a publicist who’s had the same pet sitter – and I’m not kidding you – for 18 years. My pet sitter has been ‘second mom’ to two generations of dogs in my household so I know how much of an impact your job can make on both the dog and the human’s quality of life!

Since pet sitting is a business that requires a strong level of trust, I don’t believe you’ll win tons of business merely from a good website presence or by leaving your business cards at the vet.

All too often, a pet sitter will build a website then sit back and hope for the best. Without taking an active role in your visitor activity, you may be missing out on new pet sitting clients.

First, define what the goal of your website is. In order to create a successful website, you’ll need to dig deeper than “To get more clients.”

You need to ask yourself this question: “What exactly do I want each visitor to do before leaving my pet sitting website?”

I hear plenty of chatter about keyword this and keyword that when it comes to building the perfect pet sitting website. Sure, you need to be keyword-conscious but the trick is knowing which keywords you should be targeting in the first place.

I can tell you one thing for sure. The keywords that I target will not be the same ones you should target. How do I know? Our location is different, for one thing.

If I target ‘pet sitting in New York,’ there is no guarantee that ‘pet sitting in [your town]’ is even worth it for you to target.

First impressions really are everything. If you do not immediately grab the attention (and trust) of a potential client in a positive way, it’ll be unlikely she’ll ever become a client of yours.

As consumers, we make quick decisions that help us weed out the abundance of websites competing for our business. The growth of the Internet has quickly leveled the playing field for most anyone to open up shop and sell any product or service they desire.

The goal, however, is to quickly position yourself in the client’s eye as professional, reputable and reliable. Here’s the best way to do just that.

Your website’s title tag is by far one of the most important elements when it comes to search engine optimization (SEO).

SEO is just fancy talk for all the ways you hone, tweak and adjust various elements of your site to give yourself the best chance of popping up in the search results for the terms your clients would use to find you.

Google, along with the other search engines, places a lot of weight on a page’s title to determine where it shows up in its search results. Get it right and you’ll see a steady flow of potential new clients.

While some may argue the most important way to promote your pet sitting business is with fliers trying to partner with groomers, pet stores and vet offices, it is no doubt even more important to promote your pet sitting business online with your own website.

Here is why…

Using just any old website building tool for your pet sitting business may prove costly if the html code it uses to turn your design into a website is not search engine-friendly.

What do I mean by search engine-friendly?

When building a web page from scratch, for example, you have the luxury of including only the necessary code, keeping the behind-the-scenes jargon nice and clean (which the search engines love).

Strangely, some of the more popular web building tools add an exorbitant amount of code while ignoring some of the most important html tags needed to be search engine-friendly.